I posted something on LinkedIn this week about becoming a merchant. It was partially a recruiting pitch for the roles I’m hiring for at Oats Overnight, and partially something I’ve been sitting with for a while. The response was fine. The thing I was actually trying to say got a little lost in the ask, the way it does when you’re trying to do two things at once. So let me try again here, without the ask. Just the thing itself.
I spent years at DoorDash watching merchants through the glass of a platform. Restaurants and shops and corner stores, people who had built something with their name on it and were trying to figure out how to grow inside someone else’s ecosystem. My job was subscriber retention. I was scaling DashPass, making the platform stickier, making the economics work for our side. I was good at it. The people I couldn’t stop thinking about were on the other side. The ones who opened the store every morning not knowing if anyone would show up. The ones whose entire livelihood depended on whether the thing they made was worth coming back for. There was no safety net underneath them, no flywheel spinning in the background. Just a person and a product and the daily question of whether it was enough.
That image never left me. It followed me to AG1 and then to Oats Overnight, where I run retention, and it followed me into the hours after my daughter falls asleep, where I’ve been building a small e-commerce business of my own. I’m not ready to talk about it yet because it’s not ready to be talked about, but I’m behind it with my money and my time and whatever hours I can find. Even in the planning stages, before a single transaction, the act of building something that’s yours changes how you see everything.
My great-grandfather Max Nimaroff was a merchant. My grandfather was a merchant. For generations, the people in my family have been builders of small things. They manufactured clothing and owned ice cream stores and shoe stores. They were also dentists and doctors and lawyers. The thread that runs through all of it, the thing that connects the professional practice to the storefront, is the act of standing behind something with your name on it and saying this is worth what I’m asking for it. This is not a coincidence and it is not a metaphor. It is the actual history of my family and it runs through me whether I want it to or not.
Being Jewish and being a merchant are tangled up in ways that are complicated and sometimes painful and also deeply true. For centuries, Jewish people across Europe and the Middle East were pushed toward trade because they were pushed out of everything else. Land ownership, guilds, professional classes. What remained was commerce. The act of buying and selling, of building relationships across borders, of creating value in the spaces between. My ancestors didn’t choose merchant life the way someone today chooses a career path. They chose it the way you choose to breathe when the room is running out of air. They did it because it was what was available, and then they got good at it, and then it became who they were. It became who I am.
I think about this every time I work on my own thing after hours. There’s a specific loneliness to building something that doesn’t exist yet, a silence where the validation should be. No customers, no revenue, no proof that any of it will work. Just the quiet act of showing up to something that hasn’t shown up for you yet and choosing to keep going anyway. It is not glamorous and nobody is watching and there is no platform underneath me making the match. It’s just me and an idea and a bet that the people who care about this thing will find me if I show up consistently enough and honestly enough to deserve it.
That feeling, the quiet tension of it, is something I recognize from the stories I grew up hearing. The feeling of being the node on the network. The one who has to be there for the transaction to exist at all. The people who came before me didn’t have Shopify. They had storefronts and relationships with their customers and the stubborn belief that what they were offering was worth what they were asking. The tools change. That feeling doesn’t.
I walk past old delis in New York sometimes, the ones that have been there for decades, and I think about what it took to build something like that. Not the business model or the margins but the act of it, the opening every morning and the standing behind the counter and the being there when nobody asked you to be. Those places are weathered and essential and unmistakably real and they were built by people who didn’t have an exit strategy. They had a trade and they practiced it and the neighborhood grew up around them. That’s what the people in my family have always built, in one form or another. My version happens to live on the internet, in storefronts I’ll build with code and fulfillment centers I’ll never visit. The thing underneath is the same. You find something worth selling. You stand behind it. You figure out the rest as you go. I’m not early and I’m not late. I just started, which is the only timing that actually matters.